Healthcare IT Testing: A New Business Imperative for Health Systems

The healthcare industry is at a tipping point: a large number of hospitals are IT-enabled to the point where clinical care and business operations can become severely impacted when information technology fails. Despite the risks that may come from dependence on HIT, hospitals have neither recognized the need for HIT testing nor established the facilities and programs needed to understand, assess, and manage related risks. Research from the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) indicates that very few hospitals have any systematic programs with which to test the resilience and stability of their HIT environments or to model the operational impact that different levels of degradation have on HIT.